I have not seen my berried OEBT in several days, she is apparently hiding from me. Maybe it means she is about to start hatching!

Here is hoping.

Not much to report on really. Two more regular tigers and a babaulti hatched in my breeding nets in my community tank, with 2 more tigers and a Malawa Shrimp due in the next 1-2 weeks. The babaulti fry are so small I almost thought the the female had just dropped her eggs, but they appear to be doing great.

The Shrimp arrived quickly and professionally packaged; however this was obviously a cull of unwanted shrimp and not a random mix of shrimp and didn’t resemble the shrimp in the auction photos at all.I will say the general color grade of the shrimp was rather low, judging the shrimp after 36 hours acclimation to near perfect water parameters based on the scale provided HERE 1 is Dark Blue, 1 is Semi Dark Blue, 2 are blonde, 6 are lighter than light blue. Update the Shrimp didn’t color up more than the initial picture.

My biggest problem with this seller is that instead of admitting they sent a cull of unwanted shrimp, they insisted that it was shipping stress and then when that didn’t pan out said I needed darker substrate. While I sit there looking at my awesome shrimp from aquaticacafe that are a deep dark blue on the same substrate as the cull sent by this seller. For a reference here are two of the shrimp from AquaticaCafe and two from Wicca. I ended up taking the 2 blonde and the 4 lightest blue males and moving them to my community tank and plan on letting them “mingle” with my established Tiger colony as an experiment and the rest are in my OEBT tank(turns out was a bad idea). I didn’t notice at the time but you can see a slight cloudiness in the shrimp sent by Wicca as well, a sign of a bacterial infection (that has since infected part of my native populations in 2 tanks)

Top were from AC and the bottom from Wicca25

To add further proof to my claims of infection and coloration here are two posts made by Wicca(27) on plantedtank. This is in a thread about her own losses to what I attribute to a bacterial infection where she claims that she cannot tell because all of her shrimp are deep blue/almost black oh and they are dying.

I used screenshots to prevent future edits (click to enlarge)

*Update* I have requested that the seller refund part of my money to help pay for the cost of treating my 2 tanks and cover some of the lost shrimp and have not heard back from the seller.

*Update 2* The seller refuses to even acknowledge that she could be the source of the infection, and have refused to refund any money. Seller has not disputed the fact that she sent me a cull of low grade shrimp despite what was pictured in her auction. Seller asked me to post a link the the above mentioned thread, I have no desire to do so, it is worth noting that the seller changed her claim of an infection to a claim of a contaminated drainage/fill hose after I mentioned that the shrimp she sent me were showing signs of bacterial infection.

Final thoughts

I will not do business with this seller again and suggest you take great caution before purchasing from this person. Honestly I don’t mind being sent a cull of shrimp (even if it was deceptive), I don’t mind that they happened to have an infection, my problem with this seller is that they consistently told blatant lies to try and cover their ass instead of owning up and working to make the customer happy. The seller stated they don’t care about making money(while refusing a partial refund) and this was just a hobby so they didn’t care about negative reviews and loss of profits. This translates to me as the seller does not care about her customers and only sells things to further fund her hobby at the expense of others.

I am experimenting with growing either moss carpeting or moss walls, maybe both at some point. Here are my two test growers. The one on the left is moss sandwiched between 2 plastic grates (for crocheting I think) the one on the right is framed with the grates and then I used a mesh material capture the moss. Both are held together by stainless steel wire (thanks to my wife who took a jewelry making class). (I have also used small zip ties)

I think both will work fine for the purpose of growing the moss in place, I am more interested in the speed it grows and the patterns it grows into.

Then again my wife required a c-section and never actually went into labor, but you get the idea. Also not sure what you call it once a shrimp starts to hatch the eggs but it has been 2 days and I really want to move her over into my Orange Eyed Blue tiger tank to get her knocked up again.

I have mentioned it before but my plan is to take all the normal tigers who get berried in my 55 gallon and put them in a breeder net until they hatch, them move them into my OEBT tank until they are berried again. Eventually getting the blue gene into my tiger population and then reintroducing any prime blues that appear in my community tank to my oebt tank.

While these are not the Orange Eyed Blue Tigers they are tiger shrimp none the less, and it is my first successful breeding of shrimp. Yes I understand they are prolific breeders and it is not impressive I did get a decent picture of the tiny babies. This is my community tank and the lighting is better and there is not the excess of tannins as in the OEBT tank.

This event happened in my community tank, so my OEBT were not effected nor were any of their tiger shrimp cousins. There were 2 causalities however 1 African Dwarf Frog and 1 Black Kuhli Loach. Both were sucked up and mangled by the pump impeller.

In the future I will be certain the sponge filter is firmly attached.

The dead will be buried or burned or flushed…. according to their last wishes. In all seriousness I need to be more careful to prevent such events in the future.